


The Best I Can Expect

by KallanEboi



Series: These are the things that are strange and yet somehow normal [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Bombs, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Kissing, M/M, Nightmares, Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-12
Updated: 2012-06-12
Packaged: 2017-11-07 13:07:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/431526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KallanEboi/pseuds/KallanEboi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim from IT is Jim Moriarty, John wears a bomb vest, and a promise isn't made (but it's the best outcome).</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Best I Can Expect

**Author's Note:**

> Part three of the "These are the things that are strange and yet somehow normal" series. Can be read separately, but it'll make more sense if you read the first two parts.

With Sherlock in bed, everything is slow, languid. I had expected him to be all frantic energy and impatience, like he is most of the time. But he’s drawn-out touches and low groans as I explore his bared skin with my fingertips, my tongue. My left hand slides over his cock and he arches into the touch with a satisfied moan. I smile. 

So does he, after.

It’s the best night of sleep I’ve had in weeks.

The nightmares abate after that, although I do have a nasty one just after the case with the Chinese smuggling ring. I fall asleep with Sherlock’s arm across my chest and his leg across my legs and wake some time later, panicking, unable to move, and nearly throw him from the bed. He sits up, watching me standing next to the bed as I try to get my breathing back under control. He doesn’t ask if I’m okay (and I’m thankful for that, because I’m clearly not), but he does stand up slowly, telegraphing his movements as he walks around the bed to me. He stops an arm’s length from me and holds out his hand. And waits.

He’s done this before, when a nightmare has caused me to leave the bed for one reason or another. He’ll come toward me, stop a safe distance away, and just wait for me to come to him. I don’t know where he learned to do that, if it’s something he thought of on his own or something he read in a psychology journal (I’d found one on his desk, open to a page about nightmares and night terrors). He always waits, always gives me the choice to back away or go to him.

I walk to him and lay my head on his chest as he wraps his arms around me, my own arms wrapped firmly around my own stomach and trapped between us. The images of the nightmare are already fading.

Not long after that, though, came the pink phone, and sleep was scarce for a few days.

And then the pool.

I leave to go to Sarah’s for tea, leaving Sherlock to watch crap telly and get the milk. I get maybe three blocks before someone grabs me from behind.

I struggle, but there are three of them, all larger and stronger than me. I manage to break one bloke’s nose before the cold barrel of a gun is jabbed into my neck. I freeze immediately. They shove me into a vehicle (I think it’s some kind of delivery van) and manhandle me into a strange harness and a coat before jamming an earpiece into my ear.

“That’s Semtex under that coat, Johnny boy,” a voice says into my ear and I go very, very still. “I’m sure you know what that is. Now, unless you want to experience first-hand what it’s like to be that close to that much explosive material, I suggest you do exactly as I tell you.”

The voice continues to talk to me, enumerating instructions and telling me exactly what’s going to happen. I’m not to speak unless directly told. I’m not to move unless directly told. On and on.

I lose track of time as I’m driven around, but we stop abruptly and they lead me into a building that smells like wet concrete and chlorine and shove me in a curtained cubicle and told to wait. So I wait.

Jim from IT turns out to be Jim Moriarty and also a _complete fucking lunatic._

Mycroft arrives ten minutes after Moriarty leaves and accompanies us back to 221B (after I fish the memory stick out of the pool).

I leave the brothers arguing in the front room to retreat up the stairs to my own room. I close and lock the door behind me before I sink down to the floor, back braced against the wall, and put my head between my knees. I’d managed to keep it together at the pool and in the cab, but the adrenaline is fading and the horror of what had happened (gun against my throat, kidnapped, held hostage, wrapped in explosives, forced to be a puppet) is rising in my brain in a tide I can’t fight.

This used to happen to me in Afghanistan. I’d go out on a mission, be completely calm through it. Surgeries too. Everything was clear, sharp, even when everything was going to hell. It was only afterwards, when I was safe and quiet, that reality set in and I panicked.

A soft tap on my door pulls me back.

“John?” Sherlock calls through the door. “Are you alright?”

“Go away,” I say, my voice a croak from the tightly reined in terror.

“John,” Sherlock says again.

“No,” I say, and it’s both an answer and a reprimand. 

“Tell me what you need,” he says. “I don’t know how this works, John. Nightmares I understand. This is different.” A pause, and then a soft sound like a deep inhale. “Please.”

“I’ll be out later,” I say finally. He’d said please. He never says please. “Just let me be, all right?”¬ It pains me to send him away, but I can’t be around anyone right now. I need to calm down first. He doesn’t reply.

Eventually, the shaking does subside and I lever myself off of the floor. I change my clothes, leaving the ones I had been wearing in a pile on the floor. I stare at them for a bit, debating whether to clean them or find a way to burn them. Sherlock probably has some corrosive chemicals I can use.

The flat is quiet when I open my door. Sherlock is on his laptop (his own for once) on the couch. He doesn’t look up when I walk into the room.

The flat looks exactly the same as it had when I left. The windows are still blown out. Debris is still everywhere. It felt like it should have changed, somehow, like I had been gone longer than a few hours.

I wander into the kitchen and open the fridge. I ignore the head and glance through the contents. They’re the same as they had been a few hours before as well. Damn.

“I didn’t get the milk,” Sherlock says from his seat on the couch.

“Yeah, I noticed,” I reply. “Don’t really blame you, though.”

“I had planned to get some on the way back from the meeting,” he says as I’m filling the kettle. I almost don’t hear him over the water, but when his words sink in it’s all I can do to not slam the kettle on the counter. I put it carefully in its base and brace myself on the counter.

“You planned that?” I ask, voice steady. I don’t look at him.

“Not that specifically,” Sherlock replies.

“But you arranged to meet with him?” I say, turning to look at him. He’s still looking at the laptop.

“Yes. How was I to know that he’d involve you?”

“For someone who’s so intelligent, you really are an idiot, you know that?” I say. He finally looks up at me. “You could have told me.”

“You would have tried to stopped me.”

“Damn right I would have tried,” I say, turning the kettle on without looking. “Or at least I could have gone with you.”

“You would have?” he asks, confused, finally looking up at me.

“You daft git,” I say. “I shot someone for you the night after we met, do you really think I wouldn’t have come with you to meet the maniac?”

“You’re angry that I didn’t tell you,” he says, but it’s half a question.

“No, and you just made a guess. Don’t deny it, you did,” I say, cutting off his token objection. “I’m angry that you went alone.” I turn the kettle off and pour two mugs, dropping a tea bag in each of them. “I’m angry that you didn’t even give me the chance to tell you no. You just assumed.”

“You would have said no. People normally say no to these types of things.”

“Do I react to you the way normal people do?” I ask, and he actually pauses. “Exactly.” I pull the teabags out, toss them in the bin, and then take Sherlock his mug. I sit down beside him. “Don’t do it again.”

“I will do my best,” he replies, and I take that for the answer it is and nothing more. He’ll try. That’s about all I can ask for. 

That night, though, Sherlock falls asleep with his head tucked under my chin.

_The world is close, too close. It’s normally echoingly vast, but now there is concrete instead of sand, a roof instead of stars. Everything smells wrong, not like vegetation or sand or exhaust or gunpowder or blood, but instead there’s fear (there’s always fear, fear has a smell, it’s sharp and brittle and malevolent) and there’s sweat and there’s chlorine._

_I’m wrapped in something that’s slowly pulling me down there’s water nearby it’s trying to drag me to the water. A voice murmurs in my ear, alternately low and smooth and then loud and brash. It directs my movements, and I have to obey the voice or the thing I’m wrapped in will pull me in the water and then I’ll drown or die or dissolve._

_“John,” it says, pitched lower than usual. “John you have to wake up.” Only I can’t obey that order because I’m already awake and so I’m dragged toward the water, inexorably forward, and there’s dancing red dots on my chest (I know they’re sniper rifle sights, I know that like I know the water’s going to kill me) and they ensure that I’m not going to fight because I’ll die one way or the other. “John,” the voice says again in my ear._ “John,” it says, and I flail, twisting, my hand connecting with something solid before I slip off of the bed and onto the floor with a thud.

It’s dark. A hand lands on my shoulder and I flinch back. It removes itself and a light comes on, blinding in the darkness. Sherlock’s room, Sherlock’s floor, the underside of Sherlock’s bed (there’s the sock I lost last week).

“John,” he says, looking down at me. There’s a red mark across his right cheekbone. 

“What?” I ask. My breathing is slowing, everything’s coming back into focus.

He disappears and then I hear footsteps come around to my side of the bed. He offers me his hand. I take it to pull myself to my feet. 

“Oh, Christ, Sherlock, I’m sorry,” I say when I see the red mark on his cheek.

“It’s fine,” he says. “You didn’t mean it.” I know that, and I know he knows it, but it still makes me feel guilty. I run my fingers across the mark, but he doesn’t even wince. It’ll be a bruise in a couple of hours.

“Better put some ice on it,” I say.

“John, it’s fine,” he says again, gently pulling my hand away from his face, interlacing our fingers. “Are you coming to bed?”

I glance at the clock. It’s half four, not quite late enough to sleep but still too early to be up. Sherlock’s watching me, and he lifts our twined hands and trails kisses across my knuckles. The gesture makes me smile. I tug his hand down and kiss him properly.

“You’ll tell me next time you go to meet a psychopath, won’t you?” I ask between kisses.

“I’ll do my best,” he replies, repeating his words from earlier. 

It’s still the best answer I can hope for.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry this took so long to get posted. I moved and started a new job and then the archive went crazy. I've been trying to get this up for two days.


End file.
